Routing

There’s a difference between being on A ride and on THE ride, but it seems to me that if you arrive at the place where the cycling miscreants have assembled, then you’re AT it, at least, if not ON it completely, especially if your route there was longer than the one taken by the masses and even more so if previous to your arrival, you’d been hanging out with friends from work enjoying the same sort of free-flowing libations that characterized the earlier part of the evening for the others.

In other words, if the head start they got wasn’t really a head start at all, then, by the time you catch up, it’s fair to say that it’s no longer a matter of catching up at all, but rather, of reminding yourself that as long as it’s a Thursday night and you’re out on two wheels, then you’re pretty much already there, even if you haven’t arrived yet.

I took a route from Kenmore to Crown Hill I wouldn’t have assayed had it been earlier in the day when more cars were out, and, as it was, the shortest distance between two points turned out to be a pretty straight line even if that included a climb up a couple long hills and at least one descent I had to do over when my short-term memory for places was even shorter than usual.

In any case, arriving at the water-wheeling watering hole, I was quickly enveloped in the full-throated conviviality of the assembled, so much so that I was able to stay awake long enough to have the sleepiest ride home I’ve had in a long time, one of those ones where you choose the scariest, least efficient route possible, across high bridges and along busy streets just to make sure you can keep your eyes open until your house finally pulls up in front of you just as if you’d been on the ride all along.